03/06/2026
One hundred years ago today, a baby was born with a HOWL!
Happy birthday, Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997). Poet, prophet, and one of the great friends of this bookshop.
On April 13, 1958, crowds packed our ground floor for a public reading of Howl.
Allen and Peter Orlovsky had spent the days before plastering homemade flyers all over the Latin Quarter. The afternoon did not go quietly.
Gregory Corso, also on the bill, objected to an opening reader he deemed insufficiently poetic, so he stripped off his clothes and read his poems naked, flanked by two bearded bodyguards who threatened to rough up anyone who dared leave. He was, by all accounts, a big success.
Ginsberg, also by then undressed and a little drunk (he blamed nerves), read Howl next and caused a sensation. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott played songs and read from On the Road. And William Burroughs, who had previously refused to participate, was lured to the front by a young bookshop regular and gave what is believed to be the first-ever public reading from the then-unpublished Naked Lunch. “Nobody was sure what to make of it, whether to laugh or be sick. It was something quite remarkable,” said George Whitman.
Here’s to 100 years of the man who made bookshop happenings like that possible.
Photo by Jack Hazzard from the Shakespeare and Company archives (this time Allen kept his clothes on!)
